Play It⌗

Development Background⌗

This was part of my “make a game a month” effort. This one took much longer than a month, though. I think that I started this back in October, so around 3 or 4 months.

The Story⌗

First, the name Rotorobot came from my kid. I was showing him the early gameplay and asked him to name the character. He said Rotorobot. You’ll have to ask him what it means.

The Story was developed long after the game mechanics and art were in place. I actually wrote and implemented the whole story in just a couple of days using Fungus in Unity.

The Story was inspired by a short science fiction story I found at project gutenberg.

Art⌗

The whole project was inspired by this great tileset over on opengameart.org by ansimuz.

I used Aseprite for the first time for a few additional tiles and images, including the pixel-art spaceship for the main character.

https://twitter.com/redmountainman1/status/1210393052675805186

Development⌗

I took advantage of KITTY Tiled importer again for this project. KITTY converts tiles into Unity GameObjects if a tile’s ‘type’ is the same as an existing prefab.

I spent a lot of time working on the shooting, jumping and jet packs. This comprised the vast majority of the coding. I looked back at earlier games such Sigmund the Mouse and Cave of Fear (TODO: write a page on this game). Comparing the character controller in Rotorobot with these earlier games, it feels much nicer. The character jumps and falls faster, floating less. I feel like the tweaking I did to the standard unity character controller really paid off.

• increase gravity
• fall faster than jumping
• more sensitive to letting go of the ‘jump’ button to not jump so high

The shooting in the game was ok, but not what I was going for. It’s pretty hard to jump and shoot accurately, because of the slight delay I added.

I used Fungus to create the dialog. This was much simpler than I anticipated, though it was my first time using it. I made a few mistakes, especially with scripting the Flowchart and hooking it up to events happening in the game. I should have used the ‘on enter 2d’ event in Fungus to trigger the next level stuff, but instead wrote a bunch of code to do the same thing. I think that next time I am going to concentrate more on story-telling in the game and try better ways to integrate it into the rest of the game. More cut scenes with animations and less bland “visual-novel” style text.

What I did wrong⌗

I felt like this game was pretty solid, but the plays on itch have been dismal.

I feel like I rushed through the story and cutscenes (3 days out of 3 months of dev time). I could have made those cutscenes more engaging, somehow. The level design also was also kind of bland, and would have benefitted from more interesting jumps and traps. The game would have looked better with a parallax background, though the original Metroid that I sort of based thiss off of does not have background. It was probably also a mistake to cut the final boss. I just didn’t have the time to finish the final boss coding.

In all I’d probably rate this a 5/10 compared to my other games. It was short and pretty bug free, but wasn’t as engaging or interesting as some of my other games.